News Archive - 2007

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.5. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.x branch with over 60 bug fixes, several of which are security related. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

November 30th - December 1st, Join us at the 2nd Annual PHP Conference Brasil. The event will take place at UNIFIEO in Osasco, São Paulo. This year's conference will have room for 1000 people. Its scheduled for tutorials of 3 hours, aside of speeches, cases, stands and a great catch up time for newbies and veterans.
Visit the website for more details. Early registration with discounted price is available until November 9th.

The PHP documentation team is pleased to announce the initial release of
the new build system that generates the PHP Manual. Written in PHP, PhD
([PH]P based [D]ocBook renderer) builds are now available for
viewing at docs.php.net. Everyone is
encouraged to test and use this system so
that bugs will be found and squashed.

Once the new build system is stable, expect additional changes to the PHP
manual that will include an improved navigation system and styling for OOP
documentation.

Feel free to set this developmental mirror as your default by
using my.php.

November 7th - 9th, Join us at the 2nd Annual DC PHP Conference. The event will take place at George Washington University's Cafritz Conference Center in the heart of Washington DC. The three day conference begins November 7th and 8th with general sessions, and ends November 9th with tutorials. This year's conference will host some of the PHP Community's top speakers and developers and focus on three primary tracks:

Scalability

Security

The Art of PHP

Please see the website for more details and to register. Early registration is available until mid-October.

The French AFUP association is proud
to announce the sixth annual PHP
meeting in Paris, on November 21st and 22nd, 2007. Developers and
managers will gather to meet Rasmus Lerdorf, Andrei Zmievski and other
prominent community experts for two days of sessions, packed with
enterprise solutions and advanced techniques.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate
availability of PHP 5.2.4.
This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.2.X
branch with over 120 various bug fixes in addition to resolving
several low priority security bugs. All users of PHP are encouraged
to upgrade to this release.

Don't miss the third annual Zend/PHP Conference and Expo 2007! This
year's conference promises to be the best ever. Join Zend, the PHP
community and leading technology companies from around the world for
three days of education, learning and networking - plus an additional
tutorial day. The 2007 conference will feature over 40 sessions, an
exhibit hall featuring leading companies such as Adobe, IBM, PayPal and
Zend, an UnConference area to stimulate impromptu discussions, and
networking opportunities galore.

ZendCon2007 will feature something for everyone – from novice to
advanced, business-oriented to technical-focused. You will hear from
leaders in the PHP community and business experts who have implemented
PHP based initiatives. Come hear from Zend as it presents a roadmap for
business-critical PHP. Meet the Zend development teams. Learn more
about Zend open source projects.

ZendCon 2007 promises to be the largest gathering dedicated to PHP.
Plan to attend ZendCon 2007 and join the PHP community to network and
learn from the best PHP minds from around the world.

php|architect is proud to announce php|works 2007, which will take place in Atlanta Georgia (USA) on September 12-14, 2007.

This year, the conference once again promises to be an excellent event for PHP developers of all levels, with talks from top PHP experts such as Derick Rethans, Chris Shiflett, Andrei Zmievski, Sara Golemon, and many more (and plenty of new faces, as well).

Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In
those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is
fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4
will be discontinued.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will
continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no
more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes
available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of
this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.3.
This release continues to improve the security and the stability of
the 5.X branch as well as addressing two regressions introduced
by the previous 5.2 releases. These regressions relate to the timeout
handling over non-blocking SSL connections and the lack of
HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA in certain conditions. All users are encouraged to
upgrade to this release.

Limit nesting level of input variables with max_input_nesting_level as fix for (MOPB-03 by Stefan Esser)

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 4.4.7 only:

XSS in phpinfo() (MOPB-8 by Stefan Esser)

While majority of the issues outlined above are local, in some
circumstances given specific code paths they can be triggered externally.
Therefor, we strongly recommend that if you use code utilizing the
functions and extensions identified as having had vulnerabilities in them,
you consider upgrading your PHP.

For users upgrading to PHP 5.2 from PHP 5.0 and PHP 5.1, an upgrade guide is
available here, detailing the changes between
those releases and PHP 5.2.2.

Update: May 4th; The PHP 4.4.7 Windows build was updated due to the faulty Apache2 module shipped with the original

Update: May 23th; By accident a couple of fixes where listed as fixed in both PHP 5.2.2 and 4.4.7 but where however only fixed in PHP 5.2.2. The PHP 4 ChangeLog was not affected.

The PHP team is once again proud to participate in the
Google Summer of Code.
Seven students will "flip bits instead of burgers" this summer:

Mentored by Michael Wallner, Hannes Magnusson will work on
LiveDocs, which is a
"tool to display DocBook XML files in a web browser on the
fly, without the need of building all HTML target files first".
This project will be of great value to the PHP Documentation Team.

The PHP Interpreter uses reference counting to keep track of which
objects are no longer referenced and thus can be destroyed. A major
weakness in the current implementation is that it cannot detect
reference cycles, that is objects that reference each other in a
circular graph structure which is not referenced itself from outside
the circle. Mentored by Derick Rethans, David Wang will implement a
new reference counting algorithm that will alleviate this problem.

Xdebug provides a range of useful
functionality for PHP developers, including detailed error information,
code coverage and profiling support, and support for remote debugging
using the GDB and DBGp protocols. Mentored by Xdebug's creator,
Derick Rethans, Adam Harvey will develop a cross-platform GUI
application that implements the DBGp protocol and allows PHP
applications to be debugged using Xdebug in a development environment
agnostic fashion.

Mentored by Lukas Smith, Konsta Vesterinen will work on the
object-relational mapper Doctrine.

Mutation Testing, or Automated Error Seeding, is an approach where
the testing tool makes some change to the tested code, runs the tests,
and if the tests pass displays a message saying what it changed. This
approach is different than code coverage analysis, because it can find
code that is executed by the running of tests but not actually tested.
Mentored by Sebastian Bergmann, Mike Lewis will implement Mutation
Testing for PHPUnit.

Mentored by Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson, Igor Feghali will add support
for foreign keys to
MDB2_Schema,
a package that "enables users to maintain RDBMS independant schema
files in XML that can be used to create, alter and drop database
entities and insert data into a database".

Mentored by David Coallier, Nicolas Bérard-Nault will refactor the
internals of Jaws, a
Framework and Content Management System for building dynamic web sites,
for PHP 6.

Extended filter extension support for $_SERVER in CGI and apache2 SAPIs.

Security Enhancements and Fixes in PHP 4.4.5 only:

Fixed possible overflows inside zip & imap extensions.

Fixed a possible buffer overflow inside mail() function on Windows.

Unbundled the ovrimos extension.

The majority of the security vulnerabilities discovered and resolved can in
most cases be only abused by local users and cannot be triggered remotely.
However, some of the above issues can be triggered remotely in certain
situations, or exploited by malicious local users on shared hosting setups
utilizing PHP as an Apache module. Therefore, we strongly advise all users of
PHP, regardless of the version to upgrade to the 5.2.1 or 4.4.5 releases as soon as possible.

For users upgrading to PHP 5.2 from PHP 5.0 and PHP 5.1, an upgrade guide is
available here, detailing the changes between
those releases and PHP 5.2.1.

Update: Feb 14th; Added release information for PHP
4.4.5.

Update: Feb 12th; The Windows install package had problems
with upgrading from previous PHP versions. That has now been fixed and new file
posted in the download section.

The news on the front page of php.net has changed, the conference announcements are now located on their own page.
The idea is to keep php.net specific news clear and also opens the door for additional news entries, like for RC releases. More changes are on the way so keep an eye out.

PHP Québec is pleased to announce the fifth edition of the PHP Québec Conference.
The conference will take place in Montréal, Canada on March 14-15-16th 2007. It features 2 days of
technicals talks and
an additional day of workshop.
Among the speakers, the well know PHP experts such has: Rasmus Lerdorf, Andrei
Zmievski, Derick Rethans, Ilia Alshanetsky, John Coggeshall, Damien Séguy, and many more.

The conference has three distinct tracks : Advanced Techniques, Data
Availability, PHP: Beyound Theory. With over 35 sessions and workshops, the
PHP Québec Conference is great opportunity to learn about the latest
development and professional techniques to help you build high quality PHP
software and meet with PHP.

Special prices are available for all Open Source community members and major
contributors.

php|architect is proud to announce php|tek 2007, which will take place in Chicago, Illinois (USA) on May 16-18, 2007.

This year, the conference once again promises to be an excellent event for PHP developers of all levels, with talks from top PHP experts such as Rasmus Lerdorf, Chris Shiflett, Andrei Zmievski, Ilia Alshanetsky, Sara Golemon, and many more.